A coalition of environmentalists and tribal groups sued the U.S. State Department on Thursday for allegedly failing to assess the full environmental impact of Embridge Energy's project to build a pipeline to pump 450,000 barrels of tar sands oil per day from northern Alberta to refining facilities in Superior, Wisconsin.

The suit filed in the U.S. District Court for Northern California alleges that the State Department is ignoring the "serious environmental, climate, and human health impacts of tar sands oil" in a "departure from the Obama Administration's commitment to a clean energy future."

The State Department issued a permit for the Alberta Clipper pipeline on August 20th. In its public statement, the department wrote:

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March 2015 marks the anniversary of a bold promise: King County's 10-year plan to end homelessness. Now that the 10-year plan is ending and local homelessness is worse than ever, talk of ending homelessness is being replaced with less-lofty aspirations: making homelessness rare and brief when it does occur.

In collaboration with KUOW this week, we examine the roots of the plan, the challenges it faced, and where community and city leaders think we go from here.

With grand jury reform elsewhere focused on eliminating racial bias and curbing police use of force, Oregon is an outlier: It is one of just 14 states that do not regularly record the citizen grand juries that charge people with felonies.

Almost five years after police killed an unarmed black man in Portland and the Multnomah Co. district attorney petitioned for that grand jury to be recorded, lawmakers in Salem are lining up behind a reform bill to mandate recording statewide, InvestigateWest has learned.

"Everyone is aware that passing a $15 an hour minimum wage was historic," an advisor to Mayor Ed Murray and the Seattle City Council told InvestigateWest. "But if we cannot enforce that, we haven't accomplished much."

Based on a review of more than 20,000 wage theft complaints, hundreds of pages of reports and more than a dozen interviews, "Stolen Wages" shines a light on the dark world of pay violations in Seattle and across Washington.

Portable, modular or relocatable classrooms — whatever you call them — are a necessity for cash-strapped schools.

But many portables become permanent fixtures, in place for decades at a time. Costly and insufficient, these aging structures burden the grid, frustrate teachers and administrators and compromise student health.

Energizing our world with wood sounds so natural. And it has quickly become a multibillion-dollar industry as governments including British Columbia and the European Union turn to biomass to replace dirty old coal. Yet what we found when we dug into the coal-vs.-wood debate will surprise you.